News: Lucian Leape, NPSF Institute Receive AACN Award

NPSF Lucian Leape Institute to receive AACN Pioneering Spirit Award

The institute and founding chairman Lucian Leape — internationally recognized as the father of the patient safety movement — will be honored for advancing transforming concepts essential to a culture of safety in the healthcare system

The award, from the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN), will be presented at the 2014 National Teaching Institute & Critical Care Exposition, Denver, May 17–22. This AACN Visionary Leadership Award recognizes significant contributions that influence high acuity and critical care nursing and relate to the association’s mission, vision and values.

Leape, adjunct professor of health policy at the Harvard School of Public Health and a renowned health policy analyst, is internationally recognized as the father of the patient safety movement.

Healthcare leaders credit Leape for inspiring the patient safety movement with publication of his seminal article “Error in Medicine” in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association in 1994.

He was a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Quality of Care in America Committee, which published “To Err Is Human: Building a Safer Health System” in 1999 and “Crossing the Quality Chasm” in 2001.

In 2007, NPSF selected Leape to lead its new think tank to spearhead efforts to define and advance the transforming concepts that are essential to a culture of safety in the healthcare system, naming it the Lucian Leape Institute to honor his efforts.

Those concepts include medical education reform, active consumer engagement in all aspects of healthcare, transparency as a practiced value, integration of care within and across care delivery systems, restoration of joy and meaning in work, and the safety of the healthcare workforce.

Institute members are among the most highly respected patient safety experts in the world.

About the AACN Pioneering Spirit Award: The annual AACN Pioneering Spirit Award recognizes significant contributions that influence high acuity and critical care nursing regionally and nationally, and relate to AACN’s mission, vision and values. Recipients of this Visionary Leadership Award come from business, academia and healthcare, and receive a plaque and $1,000 honorarium at the National Teaching Institute & Critical Care Exposition. Other Visionary Leadership Awards, AACN’s highest honor, include AACN’s Lifetime Member Award, Honorary Member Award and the Marguerite Rodgers Kinney Award for a Distinguished Career.

About the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses: Founded in 1969 and based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses (AACN) is the largest specialty nursing organization in the world. AACN joins together the interests of more than 500,000 acute and critical care nurses and claims more than 235 chapters worldwide. The organization’s vision is to create a healthcare system driven by the needs of patients and their families in which acute and critical care nurses make their optimal contribution.